James Poulos writes about political news, focusing on our choices for liberty and our options for reform. He's a columnist at The Daily Beast, the host of the Free Radicals podcast, and the frontman of a band called Black Hi-Lighter.

Richard Rorty, Rand Paul, And Conservative Soul-Searching In The Ruins Of Europe

Now that the Romney ordeal is over, most right-of-center commentators are looking inward — not just into their own party and their own movement, but into the innards of the American experience. That’s why it’s so refreshing to see, at National Review, an idiosyncratic deep dive into Europe’s cultural corruption that links up to conservatives’ troubles across the pond. Michael Knox Beran:

Unlike the pastoral culture it was intended to replace, the new therapeutic machinery was to be compulsory rather than voluntary, national rather than local, secular rather than spiritual, rigidly bureaucratic rather than idiosyncratically flexible. The old pastoral culture was a product not merely of the religious sensibility of the old Europeans but of their aesthetic finesse: They used art and especially music to create desirable patterns of order in everyday life. (Art and music, the Greeks believed, are more effective than laws in the building of cities — an insight that we in our rage for rule-making have forgotten.) The old pastoral culture of the West appealed to the imagination, for it was saturated with myth and deeply indebted to the poets. The new redemptive machinery, by contrast, was sterile and unimaginative: It said nothing to the soul. Such was the viper the northern sages nourished in their bosoms. They called it socialism.

Republican wonks may complain that European-style socialism is bad economics, but, really, the root fear is that the wrong political economy can wreck a culture. And it’s not just Republicans who think that America has an exceptional, and exceptionally good, culture — whether as a consequence of providence or, as left nationalist Richard Rorty would have it, contingency. Rorty’s muscular defense of left Americanism emphasizes the cultural superiority of organic pragmatism to the Northern European model, which arbitrarily applies abstract rationalism to the structuring of social life. Rorty recognized, almost alone among his class of thinkers, that no amount of effort to correspond policy to society will substitute for the ‘right’ social poetry — ‘right’ meaning, in his pragmatist idiom, the poetry with the right fit, the poetry that moves, touches, and inspires people to achieve new possibilities that cohere with one other peacefully and fruitfully.

Beran’s piece is important because it helps signal to conservatives that their now-familiar struggle to get the policy right in an electoral sense is a waste of time without a tandem, and even more important, effort to get the poetry right. And unfortunately for Republicans — lavish critical praise of Lincoln notwithstanding — the good old poetry of the GOP just doesn’t move or touch or inspire enough people the way that it used to. (It’s a problem exacerbated by Bush and Obama’s joint effort to replace modern war — defined above all by patriotic nationalism — with postmodern war, too decentralized, networked, modular, remote, and virtual to authoritatively command our collective consecration in the crucible of directly experienced cruelty and tragedy. Of course, this innovation was not Bush or Obama’s plan so much as a practical response to the political, economic, and military preferences of the American people themselves.) As I’ve said before, Republicans find themselves in a tight spot: their trump card, when confronted with liberal patronage identity politics, is militant nationalism, and, stripped of its sacred, Lincolnian character, militant nationalism ceases to be a communitarian enterprise, and becomes a corporatist one.

Where is the new poetry to be found? Europe makes an instructive contrast. One thing Beran doesn’t address is the powerful way that Friedrich Nietzsche long ago dealt with precisely the European problem he bemoans. For Nietzsche, Northern and Southern Europe were almost elementally different, and the difference involved what he called ‘ripeness’ or, more pejoratively, corruption. The North’s barbarians, and later its rationalists and its puritans, were all enemies of ripeness, while the South’s emperors, slaves, artists, libertines, louches, and, eventually, many of its priests all showed forth in a sort of sun-drenched decadence that Nietzsche wanted to describe in the post-moral terms of plump, slightly pulpy fruit bulging from a vine. The problem for Nietzsche was simple: how could these two dramatically different, even opposed, cultures and visions come together to create a unified whole, instead of destroying or disabling one another?

Nietzsche’s answer revolved around a handful of proto-Ubermensch figures like Goethe. And the only near-contemporary who stood within or near this pantheon was Napoleon Bonaparte, who loomed so large for Nietzsche because he alone came anywhere close to unifying Europe politically. Indeed, Napoleon was able to do this because he embodied a European unity that escaped so many — bringing a “decisive” “slab of antiquity” into the modern world, and tyrannizing the contradictions or tensions between them into something resembling, at least for a while, submission.

This is significant for American conservatives because if Nietzsche is right, the only poetry that can lead Europe away from endless refragmentation is that of a fearsome but captivating Napoleonic return. In Europe, the poetry of nationalism (which, Nietzsche claims, was the consequence of Napoleon’s defeat) has always led to disunity; in America, by stark contrast, nationalist poetry has always pointed the way toward a reaffirmation of unity. Though the necessity of the Napoleonic in Europe underscores mainstream US conservatives’ cherished conviction that the New World really is forever unlike the Old, it also undermines their cherished conviction that America is part of something bigger than itself called Western civilization. This uneasy tension is exacerbated by the perceived intention of American liberals to reunite the Western world by making America more like contemporary Europe — more top-down, more bureaucratic, more official, more collectivist, more rationalist. The left’s claim to restoring Western unity threatens to put the American right in an unfamiliar state of poetic impoverishment. Liberals can seize the language of nationalism, Westernism, equality, and History in a single political stroke, carrying off the legacy of Lincoln and leaving the right with a squabbling hodgepodge of unflattering and incompatible remainders.

Resolving this difficulty will probably require the right of center to take a leap of faith into rather uncomfortable waters. Republicans like to think of themselves as the party of winners, and well-deserved winners at that. The GOP cult of success emanates from a shared sense that rugged individualism boils down to deserving one’s triumphs and one’s earned comforts. It’s natural in that way that Republicans want to be the party of upward mobility. But their fixation on this theme has blinded them to their historical relationship with what Thomas Pynchon called the “preterite” — basically, history’s, and America’s, losers. The Democrats have now gotten very good at making “losers” feel like they’re also winners. If Republicans are to prevail, they are going to have to figure out a better way — that is, a more authentic and better-fitting way — of illustrating for America’s preterite how it is that they are also always already winners.

We know already that the “path to prosperity” isn’t fitting this bill as a Republican poem, no matter how well-intentioned or valid its conceptual architecture. But what about this?

As I walk through airports, ride in taxis and meet people in large cities — people of color, working-class people, people with tattoos, people in overalls, people with piercings and even, at times, people in suits — I am amazed at the diversity of folks who come up and say how much they admire Ron Paul.

At rallies around the country, from the liberal bastion of Berkeley, Calif., where 8,000 students came to an event, to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, kids from all over the political spectrum came to listen to Ron Paul.

[...] His colleagues in Congress would ask with envy, “How do you raise so much money from the youth? From the Internet?” The truth was much more revealing. College students, welders, carpenters, maids, blacks, whites and Hispanics latched onto Ron Paul’s unique message of fiscal conservatism, personal privacy and liberty and a less bellicose foreign policy, one of taking care of things at home before sending our soldiers and our money abroad. It is and was the message that attracted the youth, the message that combined the fiscal conservatism and limited constitutional government of Republicans and a more restrained foreign policy sometimes exhibited by Democrats.

When the GOP examines itself to try to regain its mojo, I hope Republicans will look at the message of Ron Paul, because as it stands now, the GOP is a dinosaur that can’t compete on the West Coast, in New England or in the Great Lakes region. Before the powers that be call for abandoning our limited-government principles, maybe we should look at how Ron Paul adhered more consistently to the first principles of our founders and, in the process, found a unique and diverse coalition that actually could have competed in a world not controlled by a two-party system.

Set aside your quibbles with how obviously this isn’t an epic poem. Focus on the fact that a sitting United States Senator — a Republican! — is talking, in public, about large cities, about people of color, about tattoos and piercings, about mojo… as part of his central message about the future, about a possible connection between the Republican party and America’s preterite. Obviously diversity is not synonymous with loserdom in its pejorative sense. Rather, many of our most rugged individuals are among those who feel, with strong justification, as if they are losing in America, and that the Republican party does not stand in guilt-free relation to that felt fact. Rand Paul’s developing rhetoric dispenses with the old City-on-a-Hill stuff in favor of something much more powerfully connected to real-life American experience. It isn’t afraid to walk through the city streets. It isn’t afraid to consort with the preterite. Just on those grounds it is something new and something poetic, and it has the makings of an antidote both to the fading lyrics sheet of the GOP and the un-American future augured in Western civilization’s Old World half.

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